NASA’s Voyager Could Be The Inspiration For A Musical

I am quite sure that after reading this story, most of us would most probably not look at data in the same way, ever again. Here is where the lines which divide art and science converge – scientists find data to be something that they hold on to dearly, while as for musicians, well, there really isn’t anything much to say about musicians other than their obvious love for music! Having said that, scientist and musician Domenico Vicinanza managed to find a way where both worlds converge, relying on data gleaned from NASA’s Voyager mission in order to create a musical composition which is not only melodic, but inspiring as well.

The Voyager program from NASA is comprised of a couple of unmanned space missions – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The two of them launched in 1977, where they were meant to study only Jupiter and Saturn. Since their mission has been over technically speaking for nearly 10 years, this does not mean they have self destructed. No sir, both spacecraft continue to send data back to Earth. Being over 9 billion miles from Earth and heading in opposite directions, it is quite an achievement for old-school engineering.

Vicinanza decided to take more than 300,000 measurements from both spacecraft before composing an upbeat piano and string tune using data sonification. In a nutshell, it will make use of musical notes to show off specific pieces of data. A single second of sound in would take up to 40,000 pieces of data. Pretty interesting concept and its execution, don’t you think so?